Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Astronomy Daily.
Speaker 2: I'm Anna and I'm Avery. It is Friday, March twenty seventh,
twenty twenty six, and our producer has given us an
absolutely stacked show. Today.
Speaker 1: We are literally five days from a crew of four
astronauts launching around the Moon for the first time in
over fifty years, and today those four people touched down
in Florida.
Speaker 2: We've also got the most detailed look at Saturn ever,
captured lightning on Jupiter that makes Earth storms look like
a birthday sparkler, and a fifty year stellar mystery finally
cracked open by a Japanese space telescope.
Speaker 1: Plus, we're narrowing down the shortlist of exoplanets most likely
to harbor alien life. And we have a juicy update
on that dramatic rocket scrub from yesterday.
Speaker 2: Boiler, it was a boat.
Speaker 1: It was absolutely a boat. Let's get into it. Let's
go then, all right, story one and Avery, this one
is really happening today as we record the art Miss
two crew is flying into Kennedy's Space Center.
Speaker 2: Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina coach
All from NASA and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen,
four people, one rocket, and they are now officially on site.
Speaker 1: NASA Administrator Jarrett Isaacman and Canadian Space Agency President Lisa
Campbell were there to greet them on the tarmac this afternoon.
The crew also answered questions from the media.
Speaker 2: Now, just to set the scene, the SLS rocket and
the Orion capsule are already sitting on launch Pad thirty
nine B at Kennedy Space Center. They rolled out on
March twentieth. Everything is in place. The target launch window
opens Wednesday, April first, at six twenty four pm Eastern Time.
Speaker 1: And April first is not a joke. This is genuinely happening,
a two hour window on the first, and if they
need it, opportunities continue through April sixth.
Speaker 2: The crew has been in quarantine since March eighteenth, keeping
their head health locked down. Before this ten day mission.
They spent the quarantine reviewing procedures at Johnson Space Center
in Houston, Texas, and now the rest of the countdown
happens here in Florida.
Speaker 1: This mission is going to take them farther than Earth
than any human has been since Apollo thirteen in nineteen seventy,
about five thousand miles beyond the Moon. It won't land,
but it will swing around the back of the Moon
on a free return trajectory and come screaming back to
Earth at around twenty five thousand miles per hour.
Speaker 2: Victor Glover will become the first person of color, Christina
Coach the first woman, and Jeremy Hanson the first non
American to travel beyond Low Earth orbit. And for Canadians listening,
Jeremy Hanson arrives in Florida today for what is going
to be the ride of his life.
Speaker 1: We are going to be covering this story right through launch.
Stick with US Astronomy Daily is your front row seat
to the most exciting human spacelight moment in a generation.
Speaker 2: Dory two, and this one is visually stunning. NASA has
released a new set of Saturn images and they are
genuinely the most comprehensive view of Saturn ever created.
Speaker 1: This is a collaboration between two of humanity's greatest telescopes,
the James Web Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope. Now,
these two observatories were launched thirty one years apart. Hubble
went up in nineteen ninety web in late twenty twenty one.
But when you combine their observations you get something extraordinary.
Speaker 2: Hubble observes Saturn invisible light in August twenty twenty four,
capturing all those familiar golden cloud bands and the iconic rings.
You get the colors, the subtle atmospheric variations, the sheer
beauty of the thing.
Speaker 1: Then Webb looked at it in infrared in November twenty
twenty four, just fourteen weeks later, and the picture completely transforms.
The rings glow brilliantly because they're made of highly reflective
water ice. You can see deep atmospheric storms, jet streams,
and a mysterious gray green glow at the poles that
scientists think may be linked to auroral activity or hide
altitude aerosols.
Speaker 2: One of the most poignant details in this release, Saturn's
famous hexagonal jet stream at the north pole is just
barely visible in these images, and sciences say this could
be among the last clear views of it for decades,
because the pole is heading into a long winter darkness
that won't lift until the twenty forties.
Speaker 1: NASA describes what the two telescopes together can do as
slicing through Saturn's atmosphere at multiple altitudes. Like peeling back
the layers of an onion, Hubble covers the upper clouds
web dives deeper into the chemistry. Together, they give researchers
a three dimensional picture of how this whole system works.
Speaker 2: And Webb's wide angle view captured six of Saturn's moons
in the same frame, including Titan, which is massive and hazy,
and Enceladus, that little world with a subservice ocean that
astrobiologists find so tantalizing.
Speaker 1: We will link to these images in the show notes.
They are genuinely worth five minutes of your time just
to look at them. Saturn is out there looking absolutely magnificent.
Speaker 2: Story three and I want everyone to picture the most
dramatic lightning storm you have ever seen on Earth, A
real cracker thunder rattling the windows. Now imagine that but
a million times more powerful.
Speaker 1: That is potentially what is happening in Jupiter's atmosphere, according
to new research from the University of California, Berkeley published
this week in the journal AGU Advances.
Speaker 2: The study used data from NASA's Juno spacecraft, which has
been orbiting Jupiter since twenty sixteen. Specifically, it's microwave radiometer.
That instrument was designed for studying the planet's atmosphere, but
it turns out it's also brilliant at detecting the radio
signatures of lightning.
Speaker 1: The clever bit was that the team focused on a
period in twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two when
a normally storm filled belt on Jupiter went unusually quiet.
That meant JUNO could pinpoint individual isolated storm systems, what
the researchers call stealth superstorms, and directly measure the power
of lightning within them.
Speaker 2: The results are remarkable. From six hundred and thirteen detected
lightning pulses, the power rains from roughly comparable to an
Earth lightning bolt all the way up to one hundred
times more powerful. But because of uncertainties and how radio
frequencies compare across the two planets, some of those bolts
could be up to a million times stronger than anything
on Earth.
Speaker 1: And these storms were generating around three lightning flashes per second.
On one flyover, JUNO detected two hundred and six separate
microwave pulses in a single pass.
Speaker 2: Lead researcher Michael Wong described it really well On Earth,
moist air rises because water makes it more buoyant in
a nitrogen atmosphere. On Jupiter, the atmosphere is mostly hydrogen,
so moist air is actually heavier and sinks. It takes
enormous energy to push it upward, and when those storms
finally break loose, they release all of that stored energy
in extraordinary ways.
Speaker 1: What I love about this is that the Juno mission
has been delivering incredible science for a decade now, and
even as the spacecraft ages, it's still finding ways to
rewrite our understanding of the Solar System's biggest planet.
Speaker 2: Okay, onto our next story today.
Speaker 1: Story four, and this is one of those stories where
astronomers get to say we finally did it after fifty years.
Speaker 2: The star in question is Gamma Cassiopeia. If you look
up at the distinctive W shape of the constellation Cassiopeia
on a clear night, the middle star of that W
that's it visible to the naked eye about five hundred
and fifty light years away, and since nineteen seventy six
it has been blasting out X rays around forty times
more powerful than you'd ever expect from a star like that.
Speaker 1: The plasma generating those X rays was hotter than one
hundred million degrees, and for decades nobody could agree. Why
was it magnetic activity on the star itself? Was there
a hidden companion pulling in material? The debate has raged
it across multiple research groups for half a century.
Speaker 2: Now, thanks to Japan's XRIISM space telescope that stands for
X Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission, developed by JAXA in
collaboration with NASA and ESA, the answer is finally in
the culprit is a hidden white dwarf companion.
Speaker 1: The key instrument is called Resolve, a high precision microclorimeter
on XRIISM that can measure X ray spectra with extraordinary accuracy.
The team observed Gamma Capia three times in December twenty
twenty four, February twenty twenty five, and June twenty twenty five,
covering the full two hundred and three day orbit of
the binary system.
Speaker 2: What they found was that the superheated plasma generating the
X rays was moving in sync with the hidden companion,
not with the bright b star. Everyone could see. That's
the clincher, first direct proof that it's the white dwarf
not the star. Itself driving all that high energy activity.
Speaker 1: And it turns out this white dwarf is magnetic. Its
field is funneling material from the star's surrounding disc toward
its pulls, where it releases all that energy as X
rays like a tiny but ferocious cosmic vacuum cleaner.
Speaker 2: The implications go well beyond this one star. Astronomers have
long predicted that about fifty to seventy percent of B
type binary stars might have white dwarf companions, but solid
evidence has been hard to pin down. This result confirms
a whole new clas of binary systems that had previously
only existed in theory.
Speaker 1: Lead researcher Yayel Naz at the University of Liege put
it beautifully. There has been an intense effort to solve
the mystery of gamma cassiopeia across many research groups for
many decades, and now, thanks to XRIIM, we have finally
done it. A very good Friday for Stellar Astrophysics.
Speaker 2: Story five, and this one comes with a movie tie
in which I am absolutely here for.
Speaker 1: If you haven't seen Project Hail Mary yet, the Ryan
Gosling film based on Andy Weir's novel. It's currently in cinemas,
and it is excellent. The premise is that humanity discovers
a tiny micro organism called astrophage is consuming the Sun's energy,
and one scientist is sent on a desperate solo mission
to find the answer at a distant star.
Speaker 2: And this week, real astronomers at Cornell University's Carl Sagan
Institute have published the paper that asks essentially the same
question the movie poses. If we were building a real
Hail Mary spacecraft, where would we send it?
Speaker 1: Lead researcher Professor Lisa Koltngeger, alongside a team of undergraduate students,
comb through data from the European Space Agency's Gaya mission
and the NASA Exoplanet Archive. There are over six thousand
known exoplanets. From that enormous list, they've narrowed it down
to forty five rocky worlds sitting in their star's habitable
zones where liquid water could potentially exist on the surface.
Speaker 2: The list includes some names that will be familiar to
our regular listeners. Trappist one DEFNG about forty light years away,
Proxima Centauri b our nearest stellar neighbor at just four
point twenty five light years LHS one one four zero B,
a dense super earth about forty eight light years out,
and quite a few lesser known candidates that could prove
just as interesting.
Speaker 1: What's powerful about this paper is that it's not just
a list, it's a strategic roadmap. It tells you which
worlds are best suited for transmission spectroscopy with JWST, which
worlds are targets for future direct imaging missions, and which
have the tightest constraints on habitability.
Speaker 2: There's also a more conservative list of just twenty four
world within a tighter three dimensional habitable zone, and if
you account for the uncertainties in stellar measurements, the forty
five could expand to as many as seventy three.
Speaker 1: Haltenngeger summed it up perfectly. Our paper reveals where you
should travel to to find life if we ever build
a hail Mary spacecraft. The search for alien life just
got a short list. I find that genuinely thrilling.
Speaker 2: Finally, today, the boat story we tease at the beginning
of the show.
Speaker 1: Story six, and yesterday we told you about that extraordinary
scrub at t minus three seconds for Esar Aerospace's Spectrum rocket,
the most dramatic last second halt you could imagine right
on the edge of potentially making European space history.
Speaker 2: And we didn't know why the countdown got all the
way to three seconds before engine ignition. Then nothing. Controllers
called the scrub. We knew there was a hold in
the countdown, but the exact cause wasn't confirmed when we
recorded yesterday.
Speaker 1: Well, now we know it was a boat.
Speaker 2: An unauthorized vessel entered the danger zone around and Doya
Spaceport in northern Norway during the countdown. The range had
already been delayed when the boat first appeared, and by
the time the boat cleared and the range was reopened,
the propellant temperatures on board the rocket had shifted, the
window was gone.
Speaker 1: To add insult to injury, the countdown had actually cleared
t minus three seconds the engines were moments from igniting.
ESAR Aerospace would have potentially become the first company ever
to launch a rocket to orbit from European soil and
a boat said no.
Speaker 2: No new launch date has been announced as of now.
ESAR has said they're working to determine a suitable window
and they'll need to assess the propellant situation and any
technical reviews before they can reset for another attempt.
Speaker 1: Now we should note this kind of range safety protocol
exists for a reason. Keeping people out of danger zones
during rocket launches is genuinely critical. No one is blaming
range control here, but the timing could not have been
more painful.
Speaker 2: We'll keep tracking this one. Esar's Spectrum rocket is a
genuinely significant vehicle twenty eight meters tall, capable of carrying
up to a ton of payload to low Earth orbit,
designed and built almost entirely in house near Munich. When
it does reach orbit, it will be a historic moment
for European space capability.
Speaker 1: The mission is called onward and Upward, and that is
exactly what ESAR will have to be. We're rooting for them.
Speaker 2: And that is your Astronomy Daily for Friday, March twenty seventh.
What a week it has been, and honestly, with Artemis
two five days from launch, next week is going to
be even bigger.
Speaker 1: We will be covering every step of the countdown right
through to lift off and beyond. Make sure you're subscribed
so you don't miss a single episode.
Speaker 2: You can find us on all the usual platforms at
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Speaker 1: And if today's episode sparked something for you, a question, thought,
a theory about whether that rogue boat was actually a
disgruntled rocket enthusiast, drop us a message we love hearing
from you.
Speaker 2: From all of us here at Astronomy Daily, keep looking up.
The universe is not done surprising us.
Speaker 1: See you tomorrow
Speaker 2: Sunday Star Star